Campbell Brown’s 74 Noticeably Silent About Vergara Reversal

April 16, 2016

UPDATE April 16, 2016: I received a tweet from The 74 editorial director, Steve Snyder, that the 74’s acquisition, LA School Report, wrote about the Vergara reversal “within minutes of news.” And so it did. Snyder adds that The 74 even tweeted the news.

Still curious why no article on The 74 website itself, and why no word from outspoken Campbell Brown– and rewriting of the LA Times piece to delete identifying Campbell Brown and her teacher tenure lawsuit machine in copycat lawsuits.

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On April 14, 2016, the California appeals court overturned the June 2014Vergara ruling by L.A. County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu regarding the unconstitutionality of California statutes governing teacher retention. As the California appeals decision states:

In this lawsuit, nine students who were attending California public schools sued the State of California and several state officials, seeking a court order declaring various provisions of California’s Education Code unconstitutional. According to plaintiffs, these provisions, which govern how K-12 public school teachers obtain tenure, how they are dismissed, and how they are laid off on the basis of seniority, violate the California Constitution’s guarantee that all citizens enjoy the “equal protection of the laws.” … The matter went to trial. After hearing eight weeks of evidence, the trial court issued a ruling declaring five sections of the Education Code… unconstitutional and void. Defendants have appealed this judgment.

We reverse the trial court’s decision. Plaintiffs failed to establish that the challenged statutes violate equal protection, primarily because they did not show that the statutes inevitably cause a certain group of students to receive an education inferior to the education received by other students. Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers; instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach. Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students.

With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes. The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are “a good idea.”

Upon first hearing of the Vergara reversal on appeal, I thought of Campbell Brown and how she rode the wave of Vergara (as Politico reported in July 2014) to “tearfully launch” a similar suit in New York– and how Brown also (tearfully? gleefully?) announced plans to fight teacher job protections in other states:

Choking back tears, Campbell Brown announced Monday that her education reform group had formally filed a legal complaint in Albany seeking to invalidate New York’s teacher tenure laws.

“This is not going to be easy and they are so incredibly brave to be taking this on,” she said at a press conference on the steps of City Hall, with parents and children gathered around her.

Brown demurred on her role in bringing the lawsuit, saying she was “just proud to be holding the coats” of the plaintiffs on the lawsuit, which she organized.

Brown, the former CNN anchor, told reporters that her group, the Partnership for Educational Justice (P.E.J.), may file more lawsuits against teacher tenure in other states. She has also recently indicated that she views legal action against teacher tenure as a potential opening to challenge an array of other union-backed teacher protections.

So, when I read of teacher tenure lawsuits, I think of Campbell Brown and the tenure-burning torch that she lit “pre-74”. And I expected her 74 to be all over this April 2016 Vergara reversal.

And yet, there hasn’t been so much as a peep out of once-tearful Brown. No coverage from her 74. And nothing new on how that New York teacher tenure case is faring– a case that is now approaching two years old.

Not a peep.

Add to that loud silence this bit of interesting news:

When the Los Angeles Times wrote an April 14, 2016, about the Vergara reversal, an early version of the article included the following reference to Brown and her penchant for backing tenure-busting litigation:

Vergara has caused small ripple effects across the country. A similar suit supported by the Partnership for Educational Justice, an organization founded by former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown, is ongoing in New York.

On Wednesday, the organization announced another lawsuit against tenure, this time in Minnesota. There, four mothers filed suit, alleging that the state’s tenure and teacher dismissal laws are unconstitutional because they impede their children’s ability to access a constitutionally promised “general and uniform” and “thorough and efficient” public school system.

Too, on the day before the Vergara reversal, it broadcast Brown’s Minnesota teacher tenure suit, including a flourish regarding the lower court ruling in favor of Vergara— and the expectation that the appeals court would rule in May:

From California to New York, political and policy struggles between labor groups and education reform advocates over teacher tenure laws have slowly made their way through the courts.

The next battleground? Minnesota.

An education reform group initiated a lawsuit against the state Wednesday afternoon, alleging that its laws governing teacher tenure and dismissal violate children’s right to a quality education.

Partnership for Educational Justice, a nonprofit founded by The 74 editor-in-chief Campbell Brown, is working with Students for Education Reform Minnesota to bring the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are being represented by Louisiana law firm Fishman Haygood and Minnesota-based law firm Bassford Remele.

This marks the second suit filed by the Partnership for Educational Justice, which is also challenging tenure protections in the case Wright v. New York, a case currently before the state Supreme Court.

Both lawsuits are modeled after Vergara v. California, in which families successfully argued that tenure protections and the “last-in-first-out” rules governing teacher layoffs deprive students of their constitutional right to a basic education.

In 2014, a California judge ruled that those laws were unconstitutional. The state has since appealed that decision; a ruling is expected next month.

So much for “next month.”

Brown and her 74 must be recovering from the shock of the Vergara reversal. After all, the plaintiffs in Vergara bypassed litigating over implementation of California education statutes in an apparent go-for-broke effort the kill the statutes themselves– which would have been a real coup for organizations desiring to kill teacher job protections.

It just so happens that the referenced earlier version of the April 14, 2016. LA Times article included expert opinion on the stature-killing aim of Vergara:

In California, blaming administrators rather than the system as it is set up wouldn’t have as much of a national reach, said Mark Paige, a public policy professor at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

“They wanted the knockout punch, and had they gotten that through sort of a systemwide strike-down, then the dominoes could have fallen in Minnesota and in New York,” Paige said. “But had they gone with a … focus it probably wouldn’t have served the objective of striking down tenure entirely.”

It seems now that those dominoes might fall in a much-less-Campbell-pleasing direction. The head-tilting LA Times edits hint at exactly that.

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Reblogged this on starmistriel and commented:
They say, “Silence is golden,” but here demonstrates that the silence of the lock-step press and Campbell Brown are complicit in their attempts to shut down public education to privatize and corporatize it. Because the Court’s decision has been viewed as popular, it behooves reformers to say a word otherwise, lest their credibility be attached to it and be vulnerable. Only the ignorant would believe that ineffective teachers are protected. Such individuals never bother to look into what is into place with teacher evaluations and due process. And I have seen such teachers released from the school districts for what amounts to malpractice. But the reformers ignore such trivial facts. NO. They paint public education as a runaway freight train, and sadly, too few have called them out on that. Shame on dishonest news media outlets for reshaping and revising news to fit their agendas.

i suppose by law yes- but personally i can only speak about my truth- what kind of teacher i know i am to be…and also this was something that i was used to saying for two years- possibly like writing last years date- a few days into the new year- it is old habit…but i will always associate myself with wrongfully included in this- my story is pretty deep- and when the connections are drawn and come out- it will be interesting…i appreciate your thoughts and time…and in regards to being dragged through the mud- i don’t want to exit this earth unscathed and without a scar- it has only altered my path- increased my strength and vision…

There is likely silence simply because, as you say, the “press” is lock-step with promoting and defending any and all aspects of a standardized testing school reform. Suddenly, they have nothing to promote.

It seems they are silent because the reasons for the reversal must now be challenged, and there is no fact based challenge possible to the statutes themselves that can possibly show they are the root cause of teacher quality/distribution issues. The true plaintiff, the reformers back room anti teacher agenda has been hoisted on it’s own petard. They are now back at square one and must find an entirely new way forward that avoids the claims and assumptions of their original suit which sought to sail unchallenged through the muddied waters of the correlation vs. causation problem.